The Indian Clerk (38 page)

Oh, that woman! Would that Janaki had only explained all this to Ramanujan! But she did not, perhaps because she saw no necessity
to do so; or she did not realize that Komalatammal would distort the facts to bolster her own position; or she assumed that
Ramanujan would understand her motives implicitly. Nor did she help her case when, at the end of her "visit" to her brother,
she elected to remain at her parents' house rather than return to her mother-in-law's. This "abandonment" gave Komalatammal
the ammunition that she needed. Yet for all her supposed occult powers, she did not possess enough in the way of psychological
insight to see that her subterfuge would threaten Ramanujan's relationship with herself more than with his wife. For he must
have felt, even at such a distance, Komalatammal's clawing efforts to interpose herself between him and Janaki, and whereas
before he had written to her every week, now he wrote to her only once a month, and then once every two months, and then not
at all.

For instance, that fall, at long last, he got his B.A. I wrote to Madras a glowing report of his progress. I even read one
of his papers aloud to the Cambridge Philosophical Society, though he did not come to the meeting. Did I invite him? Probably
not. Probably I assumed he would be too shy to want to attend.

And yet the B.A. did not, as I hoped it would, placate him or assuage his need for approbation. On the contrary, the attainment
of this emblem of success—two letters that he could now put behind his name—only seemed to exacerbate his hunger for further
trophies. And what was the next trophy to be sought? It seemed that Barnes, who had in the meantime left Cambridge, had, before
his departure, told Ramanujan that he could count upon being elected to a Trinity fellowship in the fall of 1917. I was not
so certain. His reputation was very much bound up with my own, and I was hardly in good odor right then at Trinity. On top
of that, there had never before been an Indian fellow. None of this I felt like explaining to him, though. I did not want
to give him cause for further worry. At the same time, I could hardly second the assurances that Barnes had given him, and
as it was Ramanujan's habit, when faced with uncertainty, to pester, he began to bring up the matter of the fellowship on
an almost daily basis, just as before he had brought up the Smith's Prize.

Now that I am older, I have a more dispassionate attitude toward these matters. At Cambridge we were taught to view our lives
as train journeys along appointed routes, station following upon station until at last we arrived at some glorious last stop,
the end of the line which was really the beginning of things. From then on we would bask in a glow of rest and ease, of comfort
institutionally sanctioned. Or so we thought. For in truth, how many ways there are to go off the rails! How frequently the
schedule is changed, and the conductors go on strike! How easy it is to fall asleep and wake up only to discover that you
have missed the station where you were supposed to change trains, or that you've been riding the wrong train all along! The
worry it cost us . . . yet of course, all that worry is futile, because this is the crudest secret of all: all the trains
go to the same place. At some point Ramanujan must have begun to realize it.

In any case, the morning after the auction, he came to me as always. Now I looked him up and down, and was alarmed to see
that, though his body had retained its stoutness, his cheeks were sunken. Fleshy half-moons, lighter than the dark skin around
them, puffed out from under his eyes. Contradicting what I had told Norton, I asked him if he was feeling all right; if he
needed a doctor. But as I guessed he might, he brushed off the question. "I have not been sleeping well," he said. "I was
thinking about . . ." Who knows what? Probably some detail in the partitions theorem. And then we were off.

I have never been a man inclined to dig deeply into motives and processes. Mathematics, for me, has always been like this:
you are looking at a mountainous landscape. Peak A you can see clearly, peak B you can barely discern amid the clouds. Then
you find the ridge that leads from peak A to peak B, at which point you can move on to further, more distant peaks. All very
pretty, this analogy—I used it in a lecture I gave in 1928—and yet what it fails to address is whether, in making this exploration,
you should rely only on your binoculars, or actually strike out on foot. In the latter case, you no longer regard the peaks
from a distance; you delve into them. And this is a much more dangerous game. For now there are risks that you do not face
standing safely at a distance, gazing through your binoculars: frostbite, weariness, losing your way. You may lose your footing,
too, fall from the surface you are scaling into the abyss. Yes, the abyss is always there. We cope with the risk of falling
in different ways. I coped with it by not looking, by pretending there was no abyss. But Ramanujan, I think, was always staring
down into it. Guarding himself. Or preparing to jump.

And what is the abyss? This is where language starts to fail me. It is the place where all the pieces, all the symbols, all
the Greek and German letters, fly about and meld and mate in the most preposterous, arbitrary ways. Sometimes miracles are
born, more often grotesqueries, creatures for a sideshow . . . Later, when he was sick, Ramanujan told me that during periods
of fever he attributed a pain in his stomach to the spike where the zeta function, when drawn on a graph, takes the value
of 1 and soars off into infinity. The spike, he said, was gouging his abdomen. By then, of course, he was living in the abyss.

Looking back, the only thing that surprises me about those years is that, with the exception of Thayer, no new players entered
the scene. Instead the players were merely rearranged, repositioned. Russell, who should have been in Cambridge, was in Wales.
Littlewood was in Woolwich. Alice Neville, strangest of all, was in my London flat. To these reconfigurations I adjusted with
what seems to me, in retrospect, remarkable sangfroid. I got used to seeing Alice's hat on the coatrack in Pimlico, to receiving
letters from Littlewood on military stationery. Nor did the letters from mothers, telling me that this or that former student
was dead, stir up in me the shock that they once had. Hard as it is to say, I grew inured to them. And yet there was one from
whom I longed to receive a letter, and did not.

Where was Thayer? Was he dead? I had no idea. Since that dreadful afternoon when he had arrived at the flat and I had turned
him out, I had heard not a word from him. It would be unseemly, I think, to describe here the mortifications to which I subjected
myself, the hours I spent reenacting the scene, this time treating Thayer, if only in my imagination, with the respect that
he deserved, and that he rightly despised me for having withheld. I would have liked to put it in a letter, and yet I doubted
some don's pornographic description of the orgies of self-flagellation in which, for purposes of atonement, he indulged in
the private safety of his rooms, would mean much to a lad fighting at the front. I wrote him, of course, but they were inadequate
letters: again I was the great-aunt expressing her hope that her nephew would call on her for tea the next time he was on
leave. Somehow I could find no means of voicing, even in language sufficiently coded to confound the censors, my hope that
he would forgive me. Nor, apparently, were my efforts to melt his outrage close to sufficient, for he never replied. Either
he was dead or he had concluded that I was not worth the trouble. And really, selfish and terrible as this may sound, I hoped
that he was dead. For if he was dead, at least there was a possibility that before dying, if only in his own mind, he had
forgiven me.

What I could not do, hard as I tried, was forget him. At least once a week I visited the hospital on the cricket grounds,
ostensibly to offer words of support and reassurance to the injured soldiers, really to see if by some miracle Thayer might
show up, once again, in one of the wards. Things had changed in the intervening year. In addition to the sisters, uniformed
members of the Medical Unit of the Officers Training Corps paced among the beds. They were surgical dressers or clerks. As
I moved through the vast expanse of the hospital, I would pretend to a purely academic interest, ask them to explain the treatment
methods they were testing out, when in fact all I wanted was to find Thayer. But he was never there.

Occasionally I might strike up conversations with some of the other lads. With surprising frequency these took a flirtatious
turn. But I could not muster enough enthusiasm to follow up on the leads I was offered. For Thayer had claimed me. I suppose
I must have been in love with him. I wanted no one else.

Under the best of circumstances, hope has a short life span. During wartime its life span is shorter still. At midnight on
New Year's Eve, 1917,1 raised my glass to the sky (I was alone in Cranleigh, Gertrude and Mother asleep) and declared valiantly
that I had given up on Thayer. It was a new year, and I would move on.

Two weeks later the letter came, and when it did, the almost giddy joy I felt upon seeing his handwriting nearly brought me
to my knees. It wasn't even a real letter, just one of those forms which, before the fracas, I had become accustomed to receiving
from him whenever he was anticipating a leave. I have the form still. At the top there is the usual warning:

NOTHING is to be written on this side except the date and signature of the sender. Sentences not required may be erased. If
anything else is added the postcard will be destroyed.

And then, below, the various lines to be checked off: